A Coaliation of Concerned Maryland Employers:

Wecome to the Encumbered.

We work hard to succeed. We have families. We have jobs and responsibilities and we don’t have the extra time or resource required to be an effective watchdog of today’s politics.

Politicians do not reach out to us. We are not demanding. We are not accessible. We are not available because we work. We do not earn enough to fund advocates to represent us; therefore we are overlooked. We are off the grid.

Over the past 25 years, Politicians and Special Interest Advocates have come to realize that we can be easily exploited. Although we do vote for the politician, Special Interest Advocates get to determine what goes into the bill being passed as law.
Hence “a government for the people and by the people” has been undermined and the income tax payer is left with the financial burden.

In our website you will find that there are certain idioms that we repeat. We have strung these idioms together and unfortunately these idioms define our situation:

The squeaky wheel gets the grease,
while the guy with his nose to the grind stone, pays for it
And our congressmen have forgotten what “for the greater good” means!

The Republican Party claims that they are the party of small business. However, it is the large corporations, (those with their own advocacy groups), that receive the favors.

The Democratic party claims that they are the party of the average working American, but they approve of the fact that 47% of American households do not pay any income tax, and through groups like Acorn (which are funded with Republican and Democratic tax dollars) they have rallied those who benefit most from social programs and contribute the least in order to bias election outcomes.

Campaign Finance Reform

One of the first priorities of this political party must be Campaign Finance reform. If we can’t get our representative working for “the greater good” of these United States then the rest is hopeless.

Business owners who are employers of businesses with less than 50 employees are turning to you and saying “We are on the endanger species list”. Replenishment of small business is greatly on the demise.

Healthcare Reform

Healthcare has divided this country. To those who are in support of Obamacare, they are so until they realized that those counties with socialized medicine are paying tax rates ranging from 35% to 55% plus a healthcare premium. We are concerned about our country’s debt and inability to control spending. We are all concerned with the question of “can we afford it.” Will we be a future Greece?
To small employers, most every insurance program that we have which is designed to assist Americans has or is failing! Programs such as: Workers Compensation Insurance, Unemployment Compensation Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Food Stamps (and the list goes on). Healthcare is just one of many failed insurance programs.
Yet, no-one wants to say out loud that “Health care has failed, Workman’s Compensation for the (non–union) trades has failed and Unemployment Compensation has failed”!

What do you call it when our current healthcare is so expensive that half of our country remains uninsured, or when the cost of employer sponsored insurance programs is so costly (such as Worker Compensation) that the entire residential services industry is paid off the books, or when our manufacturing jobs have been out sourced to countries where the cost of labor excludes the cost of employee benefits. These programs have failed!

Then, there is issue of policing these programs: How do you make employers in the residential trades go back to employing workers as employees rather than subcontractors? How do we bring back manufacturing? Until you can make these programs affordable again, you can’t!

Not a single state has addressed any of these concerns. The states, like federal government, focus on big business with the special interest advocates, not small business.
Insurances, which were originally designed to protect the individual from financial devastation, have transformed into a tool of daily conveniences. Insurance is no longer a tool to redistribute severe risk, but is now a money management tool to redistribute financial responsibility for common events.

So in many ways the issue is not heath care, but the exploitation and transformation of all insurance programs.

Consider the following:

According to the Economic Policy Institute (2003): 70% of our entire workforce is comprised of workers without a college degree. Manufacturing was their primary source of employment.

According to the Small Business Administration, small business is responsible for 80% of this country’s newly created positions, and represents 99.7% of all employer firms.

In the United States, we have approximately six million small businesses and about forty thousand large corporations; that ratio is 150 to 1.

According to Baltimore Employers Association, metro area employers offering medium-skilled employment have significant difficulty in finding adults, (high school grads and non-grads) who possess the self discipline and desire required to hold down a steady job.

Employers are the collection agents of government revenues. Employers withhold payroll taxes, collect sales tax and remit these revenues to both State and Federal Government. If the workers are “off the books”, the who is collecting or recording the tax liability? How can you balance a budget when 47% of the American households fail to contribute?

Hence, my questions are simple:

Why are we not requiring a tax reform that expands the base?
How can any budget be balanced when only 53% of American households are paying income tax?
Why is the entire residential services industries working “off the books” rather than as w2 payroll employees subject to the same withholding rules as the rest of us income taxpaying Americans.
How can any budget be balanced while health care costs continue to be a “run away train”.
If Romney Care didn’t lower the cost of health care in Massachusetts then why are we copying this system and forcing this on every state and denying each state of the opportunity to find a better solution.
If small business fails, who will provide jobs for that very large percentage of our workforce that cannot, or choose not, to pursue post-high school education? Who is going to provide jobs for our children?

If you share these concerns with us, then please read on and finish by joining our group. There is no financial obligation.